Various types of electronic messaging systems are known in the art. They include single-medium systems such as e-mail systems and voice mail systems, as well as multi-media messaging systems, such as the AT&T Intuity.RTM. messaging system, that handle messages having any combination of voice, fax, text, and data components. Mostly, these various types of systems are incompatible with each other. For example, they use different kinds of telecommunications networks--telephone network, data LANs, the Internet--for message transport. They use different kinds of terminals--data terminals, telephones, fax machines, multimedia workstations--for message creation and retrieval. They handle different types of media--voice, data, still image, video, plain (ASCII) text, enriched text, etc. They use different kinds of objects--binary data files, compressed digitized audio files, bit map image files, graphics files, compressed digitized image files--for message representation. They use different addressing schemes--data network login IDs, telephone numbers, Internet addresses. And even messaging systems that handle the messages of the same media represented in the same objects and addressed via the same address type are often incompatible because of differences in message structure or in formats of the same kinds of objects. Hence, interoperability--the exchange of messages--between the various messaging systems is often impossible.
As a consequence, a user wishing to exchange messages with various sources or destinations must often employ a plurality of messaging systems, and individually monitor the status of all of them.
To avoid imposing this burden on users, various schemes have been proposed for informing the users in a unified manner of the arrival of messages in any of a plurality of messaging systems, and for enabling the users to retrieve messages from a plurality of messaging systems through one of those messaging systems. Illustrative examples of such schemes are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,837,798, 4,476,349, 4,646,346, and 4,612,416.
Schemes that merely rely upon informing the users in a unified manner of the arrival of messages in any of a plurality of messaging systems only address the problem of a user having to monitor a plurality of systems for message arrival; they do nothing to ease the user's need to access a plurality of the systems. Moreover, these schemes have not been broadly endorsed, because the notifications can become more troublesome than effective. For example, one known implementation of integrated notification of e-mail and voice mail messages created two notifications for each received message, one notification for each system. These notifications had to be dealt with independently. They were not directly tied to the messages, and as a consequence, a user could first see a notification in system A, then go to system B to retrieve the message, and become confused as to whether the message being retrieved was the one which created the notifications or a newly-arrived message which might also have created a latent notification that would be encountered at some time in the future in messaging system A.
Schemes that enable users to retrieve messages from a plurality of messaging systems through others of those messaging systems typically rely upon translation of the messages from the media, objects, and/or formats of the native messaging system into the media, objects, and/or formats of the messaging system or systems through which the messages will be retrieved. An illustrative example of such a translation scheme is disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/029193 to R. M. Klein entitled "Multi-Media Integrated Message Arrangement", filed on Mar. 10, 1993, issued on Dec. 26, 1995, as U.S. Pat. No. 5,479,411, and assigned to the same assignee as this application. Unfortunately, all media, objects, and/or formats are not fully convertible into all other media, objects, and/or formats. Unconstrained "morphing" without loss of fidelity or information is technically infeasible at this time. For example, it is presently not feasible to convert a video object into an audio object, or vice versa, without a significant loss of information. Nor is it forseen to become feasible in the future. The reason is that this type of morphing is more a question of interpretation than of conversion, and depends on human perceptions and human experience that machines cannot duplicate.
While it is relatively easy to understand why this cannot always work, it is more difficult to determine when it might work acceptably well. For example, text-to-speech conversion is now to the point where pronunciation errors are minimal, so that it can be effectively used as an audio method of accessing text information. Also, optical character recognition can convert text-only faxes to text with very high accuracy. Despite the character recognition errors and the mechanized voice pronunciation errors, enough information is conveyed to make the message understandable. So as technology advances, morphing may become more acceptable as an information-access method. But it is highly unlikely that it will ever become as effective as, and hence that it will fully replace, the ability to access messages in their native form.
An emerging approach to this problem is to provide integration at the user interface for messages being retained in more than one messaging system. The problem here is that each user interface must be enhanced to deal with the peculiarities of the various messaging systems. This often results in a confusing user interface where the operations involved in managing a message are dependent upon which messaging system "owns" (i.e., is the native system of) the message. Another problem may arise when a user moves messages out of the native messaging server, which thereby precludes the server from performing its intended services with respect to those messages.